By hello
In Truman Capote's short story A Beautiful Child*, the bar is referenced in Capote's account of an afternoon he spent with Marilyn Monroe in 1955. In Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train*, Guy Bruno tells a detective that he went to "Clarke's on Third Avenue". The setting also appears in Fernando Schwartz's Al Sur de Cartago*. Why it matters in the text: P.J. Clarke's is used as a recognizable urban shorthand for New York drinking culture, social observation, and everyday sophistication.